THE CASE FOR GENDER EQUITY AND SOCIAL INCLUSION

REGINA ALACHI x-rays Amina Salihu’s latest book which attempts to align values with practice

On development discourse, most Nigerians have become expert curators of failure. They assemble evidence of what does not work with the thoroughness of archaeologists, catalogue systemic dysfunction with ethnographic precision, and then remarkably leave it all there, as if documentation were itself an achievement. What most rarely do is what Dr Amina Salihu has attempted in ‘Leading with Our Humanity’ which tracks the unglamorous, incremental work of trying to make stated values operational, and then submit that work to scrutiny while it is still fresh enough to sting. Salihu documents an attempt to align values with practice. The result is something uncommon in this genre: an honest book.

The framework is straightforward. Drawing from her experience as Deputy Director at the MacArthur Foundation Africa office, particularly its Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) framework on Nigeria Programme, Salihu sets out to explain what it means to take equity seriously when power, money, and institutional inertia are ranged against it. The book is organized around five objectives: establishing why GESI matters, building knowledge and awareness, centering grantee perspectives, offering practical tools, and charting a path forward.

But structure is the least interesting thing about this volume. What matters is the question animating it: Can a development programme funded by a global foundation and executed in Nigeria, a country where inequality is structural and inclusion is aspirational, actually operationalize justice as method, not just metaphor? And if it can, what does the doing teach us?

Salihu comes to this question with credentials that command respect. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and a PhD from the University of Abuja, alongside executive and professional studies at Aspen and the Universities of Cape Town, Sussex, and Liverpool. She has also served as Senior Special Assistant to the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, coordinated the DFID/UKAid Coalitions for Change Programme, and lectured at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaira. A feminist, farmer, development worker, philanthropist, activist, and policy wonk with more than three decades of experience in the transparency, participation, and accountability space, Salihu is well-equipped for the task.

What elevates the book beyond the impressive academic and professional profile is how Salihu uses that experience. She refuses easy victories. For instance, Chapter Six, on exiting responsibly, is a case study in how most foundations operate and how few ever account for what they leave behind. The author argues that how you leave matters as much as how you arrive, that withdrawal is not an administrative formality but a continuation of the relationship. The principle is simple: dignity does not expire when funding does. Yet in practice, how many programmes honour it?

Then there is the question of attribution versus contribution, which sounds like semantics until you realize it upends the entire development ecosystem. Organisations are wired to claim credit. Funding systems often demand it. To shift from “we achieved this” to “we contributed to what many achieved together” requires confronting an incentive structure built on visibility and branding. Salihu argues for it not because it sounds better, but because claiming sole credit for complex social change is both arrogant and dishonest. Her thesis is for funders and implementers to value accuracy over ego.

The book’s treatment of collaboration is particularly instructive. Collaboration creates a collective safety net. When people organize and act together, no single individual can be easily isolated, targeted, or harassed. Shared action also serves as a check on state overreach, as the prospect of collective resistance and public scrutiny raises the cost of repression and protects civic actors. This is not a theory. In a country where civic space contracts and activists disappear, collective organizing is a survival strategy.

What also distinguishes this work is its willingness to document the incomplete. The author does not pretend that GESI is a settled framework or that the ‘On Nigeria Programme’ solved problems others could not. She acknowledges constraints, including legally sensitive categories that the programme could not engage. Sexual orientation and gender identity, for instance, exist in a legal gray zone that criminalizes the very people GESI purports to protect. The book names this tension but does not resolve it, because it cannot be resolved within the existing legal architecture. That admission is worth more than false confidence.

The grantee perspectives (Chapters Twelve through Fourteen) offer texture that most institutional reports sanitize away. Here, you find partners describing what worked, what did not, and where foundation intentions collided with field realities. These voices matter because they complicate the narrative. Inclusion is messy. It costs time, demands patience, and sometimes produces outcomes that cannot be graphed. There is also, refreshingly, self-awareness about the limits of knowledge. Salihu writes that viewing learning as a value means the job is never done, you will never know it all, but asking the right questions keeps complacency at bay. In a sector where expertise is performed as certainty, this posture is almost radical.

While the book acknowledges harder questions, it does not always pursue them to their uncomfortable conclusions. How far can a GESI framework stretch in environments actively hostile to inclusion? What happens when the state itself is the primary barrier? These are asked but not exhausted. Still, these are quibbles measured against what the book achieves. The publication, which carries a foreword by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah R. Gbowee, explores how Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) can move beyond policy rhetoric to become a practical framework for justice-centred governance. It does so without pretending the work is finished or the lessons definitive.

At a moment when Nigeria is drafting yet another development plan, when we are once again being told to imagine futures built on equity and inclusion, this book is a necessary intervention. Not because it offers blueprints, but because it documents the gap between saying and doing, and insists that closing that gap requires more than goodwill. It requires design, discipline, and follow-through.

Speaking at the book’s presentation, Salihu reflected on the importance of community and social inclusion in development, noting that politics is local and everything is political, which means everything is local. If that is true, and I believe it is, then development that ignores place, power, and people is just expensive performance.

‘Leading with Our Humanity’ will be useful to donors trying to translate values into practice, civil society organizations negotiating power with funders, policymakers designing inclusion frameworks, and students of development who deserve to see how the work actually unfolds when cameras are off and reports are honest. It is a serious book for serious people.

Ms Alachi is the Manager for the Social Justice and Equity Programme, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, Abuja